The universities’ craze for using adjunct faculty isn’t helping matters either. According to the chronicle of higher education, 25% of university faculty nationwide are adjunct, which means that they are effectively part-time labor with no benefits.

The situation is never going to improve until people start approaching graduate school with a more realistic attitude. Most students will not follow in the footsteps of their advisors to become professors. That can be ok as long as everyone understands that going into the arrangement. Students need to have some idea of what they might do with their degree after they graduate, and universities need to provide more help with placement and career counseling. As it stands, graduating grad students are trained for one specific career for a decade or so and then booted out the door with none of the skills or resources they need to find a paying job. That ain’t right.

My advice to a prospective graduate student today would be categorically not to enroll in any program that expects you to pay your own way. The earning potential of a PhD is barely enough to recoup the opportunity costs of staying in school; you’ll never make back tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt. However, if you can get into a program (like most astronomy programs) that includes tuition waivers, getting a PhD does teach you a basket of skills in reasoning, research, and writing that are hard to get anywhere else, and those can serve you well out in the “real world”.

Anyhow, Mike, I’m sorry to hear about your career woes. If you ever want to talk about life after astronomy, you know where to find me.

-robert.